June 24, 2007

I was rewatching the original Matrix tonight, and suddenly noticed something in one particular scene. Frame grab below the fold.

If you don't remember this scene, it's just after Morpheus says, "Are you listening to me, Neo, or were you looking at the girl in the red dress?"

The training simulator here is paused so that Neo (and the audience) can see what Agent Smith looks like. And suddenly I noticed the two guys I've labeled "A". Those are different images of the same guy. So I started looking, and saw a couple more, which I've labeled. I think I've spotted others but they're less sure than those three.

This probably was deliberate. While it made production a bit simpler by cutting down the number of extras they needed, it also makes sense in in story terms, by cutting down the number of distinct "person" lattices they would need in the training simulator.

2
Sorry about that. There seem to have been some glitches on the internal network at Softlayer. We also lost NFS at one point.

I'm working on a patch to fix the lost MySQL connections; I'll see if I can get that in place today.

Minx is supposed to automatically repair failed connections, but there's an issue with doing that in the session handler. Instead of fixing itself, it drops dead, leaving a broken connection in the pool to trip up the next user who gets handed that thread. It's now my number one bug.

6
*squints* Way over to the right of your screengrab, are there two women wearing the exact same sweater, light on top and fading to dark, or perhaps yet another doubled person? Or maybe even two real-life twins?

Posted by: Just John at June 25, 2007 12:31 PM (LtbY1)

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My only reference for this is from imdb, since they used the characters called "the Twins", so my searches aren't working too well...

"Numerous sets of identical twins were cast as extras in the "Woman in
Red" scene - in which Morpheus takes Neo through a computer simulation
of The Matrix - to create the illusion of a repeating program. Example:
the tall man with slicked-back hair and sunglasses in the opening shot
is seen seconds later as a police officer writing a parking ticket."

I remembered hearing about it at the time, and how they specifically put it in there so that people would notice.

Posted by: Balentius at June 25, 2007 01:43 PM (PksEK)

8
Clearly you never read anything about the movie or heard the commentary. They deliberately hired identical twins to play those parts. I can't recall the reasoning behind it but there was one.

Posted by: JMB at June 26, 2007 11:29 AM (ZxMhd)

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I recall from the commentary the reasoning was, since Mouse coded this training simulation from scratch, he took shortcuts, doubling up characters to create a crowd effect with less work. If you're a fan of the movie it's worth watching the commentaries and extras, there's a lot of interesting little subtle elements like this pointed out in it.

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